dadageek Promotional Materials

Put plainly, dadageek is basically heaven for creative types with a geek-streak. Founded in 2015 by Lisa B. Woods and Barna Kantor, dadageek is more officially known as “Austin’s School for Expressive Technology — uniting code, hardware, art and design”.

The non-profit offers project-focused classes (mostly) for grownups, (mostly) on evenings and weekends. Anywhere from three to six courses will run simultaneously in a given season, taught by a motley crew talented creative technologists with a passion for sharing their expertise. Picture it: Wednesday evening, 6:30pm and you’re learning how to work with Arduino to create an interactive LED display that responds audience emotion. Or to create generative collage. Or robotic art. Or something awesome.

At the end of each “class season”, the school puts on a one-night-only exhibition / showcase for student work. Magnetized screens, light displays, noise machines, and generally awesomely experimental work is shown to the public. There’s a bar. There are live performances.

We’re very into the whole spirit of this. So in 2018 we partnered with dadageek to explore new technologies to promote their showcases for the year.

Process

The school is blessed to count a designer among its founders, so promotional materials–posters, flyers, social media graphics–were always beautifully designed. But this was the first time the team would bring in outsiders to create their materials.

The bar was high. But inspired by the dadageek ethos of expression, exploration and experimentation, we knew this was the place to try new things. We were instantly drawn to the idea of exploding the medium–rethinking what a poster or a flyer could be. Forget square. Forget neat and identical rectangles. This was a hive of activity–so we began creating cluster patterns of hexagons to resemble a beehive.

We also came back to the exhibit itself. Integrating the kind of work that’d be on display was the natural next step. Because the work is often highly interactive (and only ready to display hours before the actual event), we decided on a better approach: turning this project into an opportunity to collaborate with artists in the dadageek community.

For the first series we collaborated with local artist and dadageek instructor Jerome Martinez. We spent an afternoon scanning dada artworks for Jerome to use as input. Jerome then ran classic dada pieces through several coding sequences in Processing, creating the beautiful glitch art displayed through the campaign.

Finally we put the glitch, the hive and the text together, composed our hives, and took the printed rectangles to be laser cut into much more interesting angled shapes. The laser-cut design provided jigsaw-like edges and made each letter in the info-panel into a “window” cutout that displayed the artwork behind it.

Results

The project for the first showcase yielded six different flyers (all had the same information), a large venue sign / poster made of six distinct pieces, and six different banner and social media image versions. That way, dadageek had a full visual ecosystem to promote their March 3rd showcase.

Moving forward, each new series of posters and digital images will be produced in collaboration with a new artist. We will approach each project with an open mind with respect to new techniques and materials, but using the same hexagonal layout system developed. This ‘additive’ model will produce a full set of work that’s interlocking and shows the growth of the program through the 2018 season.

The work looks amazing. Flyers were immediately picked up by our students. They wanted to take them right away to pass them on. It is a perfect overlap of the school identity and the student identity. It will probably be the largest showcase we ever had.

Barna Kantor
Co-Founder, Dadageek

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